[tor-project] How to help people on weekends?

[Roger Dingledine]

Hi folks,

I've noticed an interesting trend lately. I don't have great answers
but I want to raise the topic for us to think about. We used to just
all work all the time, and we were burning ourselves out, so many of
us have switched to focusing on more traditional "daytime on weekdays"
hours. That approach has the big advantage of increased density among
core developers: people are more likely to be around then.

But while this approach works well for people whose day job is Tor,
the casualty is people whose day job *isn't* Tor. These people show up
exactly on the weekends and evenings that now have fewer Tor people around
to provide quick responses, community momentum, interaction with core
developers, and all of the great things that a free software community
needs for health and growth.

I don't have any quick fixes, but I wanted to raise this issue as a key
topic for us to consider as we try to find the right balance between
"people can have lives" and "we are responsive to new contributors". We
are not being the best that we can be when we have 60-hour gaps on irc,
mailing list threads, blog comment follow-ups, etc and those gaps line
up exactly with when excited helpful volunteers show up. :)

--Roger